A survey of access management techniques in machine type communications

Machine-to-machine communications can be defined as ubiquitous communications among machines to perform diversified activities such as sensing, processing, decision making, and acting on decisions. The main trait that differentiates M2M from other variations of communications is the lack of human supervision in the communications lifecycle. However, increased automation resulted in many heterogeneous novel applications taking advantage of M2M. This eventually caused an explosion in the number of devices participating in M2M. Therefore, managing the massive number of accesses to satisfy the QoS requirements of the different applications running on those devices has become an issue of great concern. In this article, we survey the existing access management approaches for M2M communication, aiming at a novel classification scheme that will serve as a guide and motivation toward further research in this area.